Weekend Reading: Guns, Religion, and Global Warming

The most devastating longread of the week is Sean Flynn’s masterful recreation in GQ of the massacre in Norway one year ago. The story traces the survival of one young man on the island, Adrian, as the monstrous Anders Behring Breivik slaughtered so many others. There isn’t much detail about politics in Norway, or about the life of the shooter. It’s almost entirely a narrative: minute by horrifying minute. The piece also avoids the macho clichés of the genre, and it lets you know why the protagonist survived: he was smart; he was lucky; and, as the killer reveals later, there’s a creepy reason that Adrian made it through, too.

Also frightening, but in a different way, is Bill McKibben’s fierce argument in Rolling Stone about global warming. He has been writing about the issue for twenty years, but he still has the capacity to explain in new ways, to scare, and to inspire. “The planet does indeed have an enemy,” McKibben writes of the fossil-fuel industry.

I’m late on this, but Weekend Reading hasn’t yet appropriately praised Katherine Eban’s muckraking in Fortune about the Fast and Furious investigation. As Eban, a dogged reporter, shows, much of what we think about the investigation is wrong. The conventional belief is that, in an effort to track weapons, A.T.F. agents intentionally passed guns to drug criminals, who then killed a Border Patrol agent with one of the weapons. The truth is different. The criminals were under surveillance, but, as Eban shows in great detail, the agents were actually trying to seize the weapons, and were “hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.”

I also very much enjoyed this CNET piece on Netflix’s brutal year, as well as Walter Kirn’s piece in The New Republic about his life and Mormonism. It’s not what you might expect from a liberal writer and a liberal magazine during a heated campaign. It’s a beautiful, complicated discussion of how the religion helped Kirn’s father, how it drove Kirn away, and yet how it also pulls at him. It ends with the author at the Temple in Salt Lake City. “I was after something, I realized. A lift, a boost, a spiritual burning in the stomach. I’d never given up chasing that sensation. I tried to force things by praying with closed eyes—or not praying exactly, focusing my willingness. Nothing. The roar of big trucks on I-15, the pounding of my caffeinated pulse. Then I opened my eyes and saw something I’d missed.”

And, tragically, this is a weekend to revisit Jill Lepore’s classic feature for this magazine on the history of American gun laws, beginning in the eighteenth century, moving to the nineteen-sixties, when gun ownership was a cause pushed by black nationalists, and taking us to today’s N.R.A. Lepore writes,

“One in three Americans knows someone who has been shot. As long as a candid discussion of guns is impossible, unfettered debate about the causes of violence is unimaginable. Gun-control advocates say the answer to gun violence is fewer guns. Gun-rights advocates say that the answer is more guns: things would have gone better, they suggest, if the faculty at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Chardon High School had been armed. That is the logic of the concealed-carry movement; that is how armed citizens have come to be patrolling the streets. That is not how civilians live. When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.”

Weekend Reading: a weekly column of my favorite long magazine stories from the past week. They’re also often collected on Longreads.com. (Read past ones here, here, and here.)